W.H. emphasizes proof, not strategy

Former CIA Director George Tenet’s catchphrase lives in infamy because of its link to the botched intelligence case used to sell the invasion of Iraq. So the Obama administration took near-jesuitical pains, and avoided glib sound bites, to make clear on Friday that Syrian President Bashar Assad attacked his own people with chemical weapons last week — with devastating consequences.

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The administration emphasized the “high confidence” it has that Assad is responsible for the attack, the multiple “streams” of intelligence that said so and the consensus of its many intelligence agencies. It isn’t possible, officials said, that the Syrian rebels could have faked all the different signs and signals of the attack.

Still, if the administration learned the first of two hard lessons from Iraq — the public and the press will forever be skeptical about official claims that a rogue nation has weapons of mass destruction — the White House has not appeared to embrace the second: describing the larger strategic context in which it wants to take military action.

So although the Obama administration offered the most detail yet on Friday about last week’s chemical weapons attack by Assad’s regime, no one was eager to answer Washington’s biggest question about a potential attack on Syria: what comes after.

Instead, the White House pointed repeatedly to the unclassified intelligence assessment on Syria it had been promising all week, which laid out in precise terms what it said happened outside Damascus.

“This is common sense. This is evidence. These are facts,” Secretary of State John Kerry said. “So the primary question is really no longer ‘What do we know?’ but ‘What are we — we collectively, we in the world — going to do about it?’”

Kerry didn’t answer, but the White House has spent a week telegraphing its desire to “punish” Assad for the attack with “limited,” “tailored” cruise-missile strikes. A senior administration official kept to the White House line that President Barack Obama has not decided how to proceed on Syria, and Kerry said the U.S. would observe its own timeline in deciding what to do next.

The White House did not, however, unveil any new wider strategy for handling the war in Syria. Instead, it re-emphasized its previous belief that Assad must leave power in a negotiated settlement and did not address congressional critics’ questions about the wider American strategy.

Friday’s key message was itself highly “tailored”: There should be no doubt that Assad launched a chemical attack and that it had devastating consequences. Kerry blasted Assad in a statement at the State Department and then senior administration officials followed up with a briefing for reporters.

The poison gas killed 1,429 people, U.S. officials said, including at least 426 children, in what Kerry called an act of “indiscriminate horror” about which Washington and the world should now be confident. The president and his advisers also appear confident they must do something about it — soon.

“Doing nothing sends [a] message to those in the future, a dictator or terrorist groups, that they could carry out a chemical attack in the future,” one senior administration official said.

And officials tried to address two other worries head-on: that the U.S. intelligence community could have made a mistake on Syria like it did on Iraq, and that after more than a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan — as well as the intervention in Libya — Americans are fed up with wars in the Middle East.